I will be up late tonight so I can definitely give you guys a good idea of performance and thermals, as well as answer questions. I booted up the Kaby Blade next to my Sky Blade for a few minutes while on break. First glance two things I noticed was the Kaby Blade is much quieter than my Sky. It's like silent with no load compared to my Sky Blade which even though quiet you can still hear fans spinning.( For anyone not sure going forward, Sky Blade is late 2016 model and Kaby blade is early 2017 Blade).

Next was the screen. There is a small gap you can fit your finger nail in between bezel and screen at the bottom right. My Sky Blade was perfectly sealed all the way around. Not a fan of having a gap but I would definitely not RMA over it. Also the Kaby Blade FHD screen has some LCD light bleed at the bottom where as my Sky did not. When it comes to LCD screens there is always a chance of light bleed and unless it's totally black you can't even notice. Otherwise the quality of the screen is just as good as my Sky. Don't see any dead or stuck pixels. That's all I have for now as I literally had 15 mins to mess with it. Part two later!

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Wow, that's kinda bullshit right there if the Kaby Lake is near silent.
I also saw on reddit that there's an auto mode for fan speed on synapse for the new blade as well.

I bought the late 2016, just shy of a month and a half from amazon. At the time there was no news of a refresh and the announcement came out of nowhere. Even though it was speculated by forum posts. But officially there was no heads up notice or a timely announcement.

Wow, that's kinda bullshit right there if the Kaby Lake is near silent.
I also saw on reddit that there's an auto mode for fan speed on synapse for the new blade as well.

I bought the late 2016, just shy of a month and a half from amazon. At the time there was no news of a refresh and the announcement came out of nowhere. Even though it was speculated by forum posts. But officially there was no heads up notice or a timely announcement.

I'm gonna try and bug amazon.

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That was only like half hour of usage so I would give it some time and see what I come up with after several hours of use. I have so much more to do with this bad boy.

That was only like half hour of usage so I would give it some time and see what I come up with after several hours of use. I have so much more to do with this bad boy.

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Thank you for running some numbers. I just picked up the 1060 QHD and the fans are irritating like others have stated. I have a couple of weeks to make a decision to keep or refund it. I do want the high-res screen so I didn't pick up the Kaby FHD.

I think I am one of many who are interested in learning more about the fan noise at idle. It is such a small thing but when the Blade shuts down you hear sweet silence. If the fans end up quiet like you noted then maybe I will have to rough it for a few weeks until the 4k models come out.

Couple small updates for you guys. I would have more but I only just got to sit down and fire Kaby back up. So the new fan controls are really nice. I have left it on auto and it manages heat really nice during idle and web browsing. Kicks in just a tad every once in a while to cool it down then gets really quiet almost silent. Also so far I hear ZERO coil wine. Can hopefully thank intel for this since it was a chip issue and not with Razer alone. My last 2 blades has coil wine so I am really happy to have that gone finally. Speakers seems on par with the Sky blade.. still not as loud as my 970m Blade was but they are still crisp and decent quality for the size.

I am installing crystal mark to test the drive speeds of the 1tb. I know it is a samsung drive for sure. Also installing all my Blizzard games before I put steam on the machine. More to come.

Couple small updates for you guys. I would have more but I only just got to sit down and fire Kaby back up. So the new fan controls are really nice. I have left it on auto and it manages heat really nice during idle and web browsing. Kicks in just a tad every once in a while to cool it down then gets really quiet almost silent. Also so far I hear ZERO coil wine. Can hopefully thank intel for this since it was a chip issue and not with Razer alone. My last 2 blades has coil wine so I am really happy to have that gone finally. Speakers seems on par with the Sky blade.. still not as loud as my 970m Blade was but they are still crisp and decent quality for the size.

I am installing crystal mark to test the drive speeds of the 1tb. I know it is a samsung drive for sure. Also installing all my Blizzard games before I put steam on the machine. More to come.

Very glad to hear that the fan issue seems resolved.
I am now ordering my New RB FHD 512GB.

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sweet for you guys ... but the "fix" they provided one guy .. with a new bios version to update does not help my device .. left fan still spinning like hell .. i can controll it down via nbfc but synapse wont do it -.-
dangit razer ... for the coilwhine look if they have changed the max cpu power to 99% silently under energy saver options .. hoping no one notice that cause this fixes coilwhine for most people

sweet for you guys ... but the "fix" they provided one guy .. with a new bios version to update does not help my device .. left fan still spinning like hell .. i can controll it down via nbfc but synapse wont do it -.-
dangit razer ... for the coilwhine look if they have changed the max cpu power to 99% silently under energy saver options .. hoping no one notice that cause this fixes coilwhine for most people

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seems like the fix with the 2.0 bios will reduce coilwhine on the 6700 i7 models ! only the fan hasnt changed .. but thats defenetly an ec update problem .. ( the fans are controlled by the ec )

So tempted to just screw it and pull the trigger today. My Sky Blade w/ 2 year Microsoft warranty is the same as dealing with Razer because they'd need to send it to Razer anyway. I just checked Razer site and still they only show the 1 year warranty. Has anyone called Razer after the purchase to add a 2nd year of coverage?

So tempted to just screw it and pull the trigger today. My Sky Blade w/ 2 year Microsoft warranty is the same as dealing with Razer because they'd need to send it to Razer anyway. I just checked Razer site and still they only show the 1 year warranty. Has anyone called Razer after the purchase to add a 2nd year of coverage?

Doing some more testing today guys. I will say the Fans continued to operate great at idle and during small tasks. In gaming was definitely interesting. In auto mode the fans allowed to laptop to get much hotter than my Sky Blade before blasting at max rpm. At one Point my CPU hit 84c but it wasn't until the gpu hit 80c that the fans really went airplane mode. I did not see any throttling at all and did not test fans under the high setting yet.

Played a heroes of the storm match. On my Sky Blade I would sometimes see drops to 40ish fps but I am happy to report the Kaby Blade kept a solid 60fps from start to finish. I also always noticed kind of jittery feeling gameplay with just that game on my Sky. This was not the case with Kaby. I also played about 20 minutes of WoW and noticed slightly better performance with the same settings. I generally max everything out in any game. WoW I just lower view distance and run render resolution at 150% instead of 175-200. WoW isn't super optimized so that's no surprise there. Even my 4000 dollar desktop can't maintain 60fps in 8k res in certain areas of that game.

To be continued. If I own any games anyone wants me to test...no guarantee I have them but I will gladly test what I do just shoot me suggestions. Gonna run some firestrike tests shortly. I have included my crystal mark scores as well.

Doing some more testing today guys. I will say the Fans continued to operate great at idle and during small tasks. In gaming was definitely interesting. In auto mode the fans allowed to laptop to get much hotter than my Sky Blade before blasting at max rpm. At one Point my CPU hit 84c but it wasn't until the gpu hit 80c that the fans really went airplane mode. I did not see any throttling at all and did not test fans under the high setting yet.

Played a heroes of the storm match. On my Sky Blade I would sometimes see drops to 40ish fps but I am happy to report the Kaby Blade kept a solid 60fps from start to finish. I also always noticed kind of jittery feeling gameplay with just that game on my Sky. This was not the case with Kaby. I also played about 20 minutes of WoW and noticed slightly better performance with the same settings. I generally max everything out in any game. WoW I just lower view distance and run render resolution at 150% instead of 175-200. WoW isn't super optimized so that's no surprise there. Even my 4000 dollar desktop can't maintain 60fps in 8k res in certain areas of that game.

To be continued. If I own any games anyone wants me to test...no guarantee I have them but I will gladly test what I do just shoot me suggestions. Gonna run some firestrike tests shortly. I have included my crystal mark scores as well.

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You the man. Seems like they let the CPU stretch its legs more with Kaby vs. Sky. I'm sold on this. Thanks for your testing.

Doing some more testing today guys. I will say the Fans continued to operate great at idle and during small tasks. In gaming was definitely interesting. In auto mode the fans allowed to laptop to get much hotter than my Sky Blade before blasting at max rpm. At one Point my CPU hit 84c but it wasn't until the gpu hit 80c that the fans really went airplane mode. I did not see any throttling at all and did not test fans under the high setting yet.

Played a heroes of the storm match. On my Sky Blade I would sometimes see drops to 40ish fps but I am happy to report the Kaby Blade kept a solid 60fps from start to finish. I also always noticed kind of jittery feeling gameplay with just that game on my Sky. This was not the case with Kaby. I also played about 20 minutes of WoW and noticed slightly better performance with the same settings. I generally max everything out in any game. WoW I just lower view distance and run render resolution at 150% instead of 175-200. WoW isn't super optimized so that's no surprise there. Even my 4000 dollar desktop can't maintain 60fps in 8k res in certain areas of that game.

To be continued. If I own any games anyone wants me to test...no guarantee I have them but I will gladly test what I do just shoot me suggestions. Gonna run some firestrike tests shortly. I have included my crystal mark scores as well.

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Would love to know how it performs with Battlefield 3 /4 / 1, any of those will suffice.

To refresh my memory from the other thread that had like 2000 pages ... what was the best graphics score you were able to get with the 2016 model?

If I remember correctly, many people had under 9000. So they seem to have fix something here ...

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The physics score with the Kaby Blade is what really pleases me. Even with OC the Skylake Blade was between 9400 and 9600. A score of 10,400 means that they have not throttled the CPU like the Skylake version. Correct?